Women have caught up to men in risk of dying of smoking-related diseases

Associated Press

Published 10:44 pm, Wednesday, January 23, 2013

U.S. women who smoke today have a much greater risk of dying from lung cancer than they did decades ago, partly because they are starting younger and smoking more — that is, they are lighting up like men, new research shows.

Women also have caught up with men in their risk of dying from smoking-related illnesses. Lung cancer risk leveled off in the 1980s for men, but is still rising for women.

"It's a massive failure in prevention," said one study leader, Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. And it's likely to repeat itself in places like China and Indonesia where smoking is growing, he said. About 1.3 billion people worldwide smoke.

The research is in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. It is one of the most comprehensive looks ever at long-term trends in the effects of smoking and includes the first generation of U.S. women who started early in life and continued for decades, long enough for health effects to show up.

Among the findings of the two studies:

The risk of dying of lung cancer was more than 25 times higher for female smokers in recent years than for women who never smoked.

A person who never smoked was about twice as likely as a current smoker to live to age 80.

Smokers in the U.S. are three times more likely to die between ages 25 and 79 than nonsmokers.

Smoking shaves more than 10 years off the average life span, but quitting at any age buys time. Quitting by age 40 avoids nearly all the excess risk of death from smoking.